Tens of thousands rally in France against racism and police violence

Tens of thousands of people rallied on Saturday in Paris and several other French cities to pay tribute to Georges Floyd, an African American who died from police brutality in the United States and the victims of police violence in France.

Despite the ban on gatherings of more than 10 people in Paris due to coronavirus sanitary concerns, people turned out massively at Place de la concorde and the Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower to show their solidarity with widespread demonstrations in the United States.

Many protesters, knee on the ground, chanting “I cannot breathe,” in homage to Floyd, 46, who died ten days ago after a white United States police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes until he stopped breathing.

On Friday it announced that “Selma” would be free for rental for the remainder of June, saying that had been planned earlier this week.

“We hope this small gesture will encourage people throughout the country to examine our nation’s history and reflect on the ways that racial injustice has infected our society,” Paramount said in a statement.

“Explosive materials including 17 rolls of detonating codes and one packet containing 100 pieces of supreme detonators have been recovered by a multi-agency team of officers,” DCI said in a statement on Friday evening.

Two police officers of Buffalo, New York, were suspended without pay on Thursday after a viral video showed them pushing an old man to the ground at a protest over Floyd’s death.

“When I saw the video from Buffalo, it made me sick to my stomach. Where was the threat? How can you walk by a person when there’s blood coming out of his head? It’s fundamentally inhumane & frightening,” tweeted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday.

The local police department first claimed the man tripped and fell, but the video told a different story. The 75-year-old man is in stable but serious condition in hospital, city leaders said.

In Atlanta, Georgia, six police officers have been fired with five of the facing charges of excessive force against two college students during a protest Saturday.

Body camera footage shows the two students, who were on their way home from picking up food when they got caught in traffic downtown caused by the protest, were hit with tasers by officers before being pulled out of their car.

A Philadelphia police commander has been charged with aggravated assault for allegedly beating a student from Temple University with a baton during a protest Tuesday in Center City district, the city’s district attorney said Friday night.

The cop is seen in a cell phone video attacking the student, then jumping on the student and making an arrest.

A police officer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been relieved of duty and placed on administrative leave after a viral video showed him knocking over a protester who was kneeling with her hands up.

The shaky footage shows the officer walked away from a crowd of demonstrators before shoving the protester who was kneeling behind him.

“Hi. You’re probably seeing this pinned tweet because cops are rioting nationwide and I’m trying to keep track,” wrote T. Greg Doucette, an attorney in North Carolina, who has compiled 323 clips of videotaped incidents by Friday evening at his Twitter account @greg_doucette.

“The demonstrations around the country take as their starting point that police are brutalizing citizens of color. Law-enforcement officers and agencies have two ways to respond: They can affirm that complaint with aggressive policing and overwhelming force, or they can work to show they are on the same side, against brutality … but the aggressive strategy clearly doesn’t,” he said.

The “Say Their Name” agenda will make prior disciplinary records of law enforcement officers transparent, ban chokeholds and make false race-based 911 reports a hate crime, said Cuomo at his daily briefing.

Meanwhile, the state’s attorney general will work as an independent prosecutor for deaths of unarmed civilians caused by law enforcement, he said.

“Mr. Floyd’s murder was the breaking point of a long list of deaths that were unnecessary and abusive, and people are saying ‘enough is enough,'” said Cuomo.

The governor pointed out that stopping police abuse vindicates the “99.9 percent of police who are there to do the right thing” and would also make the community-police relationship work better, he added.

Cuomo said New York should lead the charge and he would work with the state legislature to pass the agenda next week.

Confrontations — some times violent — between protesters and police have erupted during demonstrations nationwide during the past week. The governor said Thursday’s incident in Buffalo of upstate New York between two officers and a 75-year-old man was “wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful.”

In a video circulating online, two heavily-armed officer pushed the man, who approached them alone during a protest over George Floyd’s death, while asking him to move back.

The man tripped and fell backward with his head hitting the ground. Blood was seen coming from his head while no officer came to tend him immediately, as the video showed.

“Why? Why was that necessary? Where was the threat?” Cuomo questioned. “It’s just fundamentally offensive and frightening. How did we get to this place?”

The governor said he had spoken with Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and they agreed that the officers involved should be immediately suspended, a decision that was announced late on Thursday.

Cuomo said he had also spoken on the phone with the old man, who was in serious condition but is “thankfully alive.”

“I believe the district attorney is looking into it from a possible criminal liability point of view, and I applaud the district attorney for moving quickly,” the governor added.